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How to give your garden a green makeover

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Continuing our series of green makeover posts, today we’ll be concentrating on your garden. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make a few changes to the way you garden, and make a big difference to the planet. These suggestions are not only for those with large suburban or rural gardens. They apply equally to those of you with a roof garden, or a few pots on a balcony.

Composting

Composting is a fantastic way of reducing household waste, and it’s a free resource of nutrition for your garden, preventing the need for peat-based compost and chemical fertilisers. There are so many ways to compost, some even suitable for flat-dwellers. Here is a look at some of those options:

  • Simple Composting – You’ll need a garden for this, and somewhere to “cook” the compost. Either dig a hole and be an undercover composter, make yourself a composter or buy a composter and fill it with your fruit and veg peelings and garden waste. A few months later, you’ll have free, ready-to-use compost for your garden or pots.
  • Vermi-composting – This is composting with worms. It’s faster than simple composting, and a good way to compost cooked food waste (not meat). When you compost with worms, you not only have a nutritious, fine compost, but also a great free supply of liquid fertiliser for your plants, sometimes known as worm tea. You can keep your wormery in a shed or on a balcony, so this type of composting would work well if you lived in a flat with a balcony. Wormeries come in various shapes and sizes.
  • Indoor composting – There is a system for composting right in your kitchen called Bokashi. It is completely smell free and you can even compost meat, fish and dairy products. After a few days, the waste is ready to be put into your outdoor composter, or dug into the garden.
  • Food waste digester – A food waste digester can also cope with meat, fish and cooked food. It needs to have part of the equipment buried in the ground, so you’ll need a reasonable portion of garden.

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